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Happiness, 2.05 (V) Week 2 Video 4 - Flow is discovered

2.05 (V) Week 2 Video 4 - Flow is discovered

[MUSIC] Aloha, my friend and welcome back. In the last two videos, I noted that the need for superiority is bad in many ways. It lowers your happiness levels for a variety of reasons, and it also lowers your chances of success, particularly in intellectual and creative tasks. The need for superiority, however, is not all bad. It does play a positive role in lighting a fire under our backside and motivating us to get things done. Several people, including Lance Armstrong and Raj Rajaratnam have been spurred by the need for superiority to accomplish things. But at the same time it has also led them to do devious and unethical things that eventually got them into trouble, as you may know. If the only way in which the need for superiority is useful is that it goads us to get things done, but other than that it pretty much only has negative effects on everything else including happiness and success. Then it seems that the best thing to do is to get to rid of the need for superiority and find another way to motivate ourselves. If we manage to do this successfully, not only would we get things done, we'd also be happier and more successful. So, the question of paramount importance is this. Is there something else that can motivate us just as powerfully as the need for superiority can? And if so, what is it? [MUSIC] To answer this question, let me tell you a story. See this man on this screen? His name is Viktor Frankl. In 1946, soon after the second World War, he published a book called Man's Search for Meaning which went on to become one of the most acclaimed books ever. Time magazine rated this book as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century. And according to a survey conducted by the Book of the Month Club and the Library of Congress, Man's Search For Meaning belongs to the list of the ten most influential book in the United States. In 1942, Viktor Frankl was a very successful and celebrated physician and therapist in Vienna. However, on the 25th of that year, he was arrested by the Nazis. Why? Because he was a Jew and, as you may know, the Nazis were hell-bent on getting rid of all the Jews. Frankel and his wife along with his parents were first deported to a ghetto and later, to separate concentration camps. Frankel spent the next three years in concentration camps and by the time he was released, his wife and his parents had died at the hands of the Nazis. My search for meaning recounts many of Frankel's experiences in the concentration camps. One of the main points that Frankel makes in his book, is that human beings are unique In that they cannot be happy unless their life is meaningful. In fact, he argues that even in the most trying and direst of circumstances, such as the ones that he encountered in the concentration camps, so long as you can derive meaning from suffering, life could actually be quite fulfilling. You may not be happy in terms of your creature comforts. In fact, life could be very painful at the level of your creature comforts, but you could still find life to be quite worthwhile. Now, let's fast forward a few years. In the 1970s and 80s, another young gentleman named Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi put Frankel's idea that to be happy your life needs to have meaning to detest. In his best known studies, Csikszentmihalyi used something called the Experience Sampling Method to figure out when people are happiest and how doing something meaningful is so critical to happiness. I recently had the pleasure of talking to the great man himself about the experience sampling method and how it works. Here's what Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi had to say about it. Note that our conversation happened on Google Hangout, so the video and the audio quality is not the greatest, which means that you may need to focus a little bit harder than normally. » The war, the pager, and the little booklet. And the booklet had pages which asked you, each page set started with what time is it? Where are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? What are you thinking? And then, after that, there were about 40 dimensions of experience they could check, like how well were you concentrating from zero to nine? How easy was it to concentrate, from zero to nine? How happy you were, how creative you felt etc.? So, a person wears this pager and booklet and at random moments of the day, eight times a day from early morning to 11 at night, two hour intervals roughly, but randomly, you would get the pager signaling, beeping. When you heard the beep you take out a booklet and fill out the page. You do that for a week. At the end of the week you have about 56 signals that you responded to, and you can plot the person's life during that week in terms of where he felt most creative, least creative, most happy, least happy. In terms of all kinds of questions. Who they were with when they were happy. » So basically, as you just heard what Czikszentmihalyi did was to ask people to carry a booklet and a pager with them. He programmed these pagers to go off at random times during the course of the next week. And whenever the pager went off, the task of the participants was to take out the booklet and write down what they were doing and how happy they were doing it. So for example, if you had been a participant in that study and your pager Went off right now, you would take home a booklet and write in it. I was watching Raj's lecture and boy, am I totally happy. After the week was over, she sent me highly collective booklets from all the participants and he started pouring over them. He wanted to find out what types of events or activities make people happy, and whether these events and activities were meaningful to people. It is in the process of conducting a study that Czikszentmihalyi identified something really important. He found that people were indeed happiest when they were doing something that they found meaningful. So Frankel was right, however, Czikszentmihalyi didn't stop at documenting that people were happiest when they were doing something meaningful. He went on to figure out some common features to the experiences that people from a variety of backgrounds, from artists and business people to scientists and laborers, find meaningful. He coined a term to refer to these experiences, flow. In the next video I'm going to tell you more about flow experiences. Until then, goodbye. [MUSIC]


2.05 (V) Week 2 Video 4 - Flow is discovered

[MUSIC] Aloha, my friend and welcome back. In the last two videos, I noted that the need for superiority is bad in many ways. It lowers your happiness levels for a variety of reasons, and it also lowers your chances of success, particularly in intellectual and creative tasks. The need for superiority, however, is not all bad. It does play a positive role in lighting a fire under our backside and motivating us to get things done. Several people, including Lance Armstrong and Raj Rajaratnam have been spurred by the need for superiority to accomplish things. But at the same time it has also led them to do devious and unethical things that eventually got them into trouble, as you may know. If the only way in which the need for superiority is useful is that it goads us to get things done, but other than that it pretty much only has negative effects on everything else including happiness and success. Then it seems that the best thing to do is to get to rid of the need for superiority and find another way to motivate ourselves. If we manage to do this successfully, not only would we get things done, we'd also be happier and more successful. So, the question of paramount importance is this. Is there something else that can motivate us just as powerfully as the need for superiority can? And if so, what is it? [MUSIC] To answer this question, let me tell you a story. See this man on this screen? His name is Viktor Frankl. In 1946, soon after the second World War, he published a book called Man's Search for Meaning which went on to become one of the most acclaimed books ever. Time magazine rated this book as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century. And according to a survey conducted by the Book of the Month Club and the Library of Congress, Man's Search For Meaning belongs to the list of the ten most influential book in the United States. In 1942, Viktor Frankl was a very successful and celebrated physician and therapist in Vienna. However, on the 25th of that year, he was arrested by the Nazis. Why? Because he was a Jew and, as you may know, the Nazis were hell-bent on getting rid of all the Jews. Frankel and his wife along with his parents were first deported to a ghetto and later, to separate concentration camps. Frankel spent the next three years in concentration camps and by the time he was released, his wife and his parents had died at the hands of the Nazis. My search for meaning recounts many of Frankel's experiences in the concentration camps. One of the main points that Frankel makes in his book, is that human beings are unique In that they cannot be happy unless their life is meaningful. In fact, he argues that even in the most trying and direst of circumstances, such as the ones that he encountered in the concentration camps, so long as you can derive meaning from suffering, life could actually be quite fulfilling. You may not be happy in terms of your creature comforts. In fact, life could be very painful at the level of your creature comforts, but you could still find life to be quite worthwhile. Now, let's fast forward a few years. In the 1970s and 80s, another young gentleman named Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi put Frankel's idea that to be happy your life needs to have meaning to detest. In his best known studies, Csikszentmihalyi used something called the Experience Sampling Method to figure out when people are happiest and how doing something meaningful is so critical to happiness. I recently had the pleasure of talking to the great man himself about the experience sampling method and how it works. Here's what Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi had to say about it. Note that our conversation happened on Google Hangout, so the video and the audio quality is not the greatest, which means that you may need to focus a little bit harder than normally. » The war, the pager, and the little booklet. And the booklet had pages which asked you, each page set started with what time is it? Where are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? What are you thinking? And then, after that, there were about 40 dimensions of experience they could check, like how well were you concentrating from zero to nine? How easy was it to concentrate, from zero to nine? How happy you were, how creative you felt etc.? So, a person wears this pager and booklet and at random moments of the day, eight times a day from early morning to 11 at night, two hour intervals roughly, but randomly, you would get the pager signaling, beeping. When you heard the beep you take out a booklet and fill out the page. You do that for a week. At the end of the week you have about 56 signals that you responded to, and you can plot the person's life during that week in terms of where he felt most creative, least creative, most happy, least happy. In terms of all kinds of questions. Who they were with when they were happy. » So basically, as you just heard what Czikszentmihalyi did was to ask people to carry a booklet and a pager with them. He programmed these pagers to go off at random times during the course of the next week. And whenever the pager went off, the task of the participants was to take out the booklet and write down what they were doing and how happy they were doing it. So for example, if you had been a participant in that study and your pager Went off right now, you would take home a booklet and write in it. I was watching Raj's lecture and boy, am I totally happy. After the week was over, she sent me highly collective booklets from all the participants and he started pouring over them. He wanted to find out what types of events or activities make people happy, and whether these events and activities were meaningful to people. It is in the process of conducting a study that Czikszentmihalyi identified something really important. He found that people were indeed happiest when they were doing something that they found meaningful. So Frankel was right, however, Czikszentmihalyi didn't stop at documenting that people were happiest when they were doing something meaningful. He went on to figure out some common features to the experiences that people from a variety of backgrounds, from artists and business people to scientists and laborers, find meaningful. He coined a term to refer to these experiences, flow. In the next video I'm going to tell you more about flow experiences. Until then, goodbye. [MUSIC]